She makes lengthy forays into such topics as McCarthyism, the formation and operation of the CIA, the propaganda work of the Hollywood film industry, and New York cultural politics--from Partisan Review to MOMA to Abstract Expressionism.

In his thoughtful, carefully researched, and highly informative introductory essay to this direly needed reprint of Iron City by Northeastern University Press, Alan Wald ascribes the novel's lack of success to the hostility of an American public discourse that had succumbed to the ideological doctrines of McCarthyism and the Cold War, and ascribes its rapid disappearance from the book market to "the change of political climate and in the culture of the U.

In a narrow sense McCarthyism is the name given to the attitudes and practices of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57) and his followers engrossed in investigating and purging purported security risks, especially those supposedly with ties present or former, actual or imagined, to Communist groups and governments during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

At the height of McCarthyism, Lillian Hellman, like other luminaries, took great pride in defending the civil liberties of Hollywood Reds, declaring to the House Un-American Activities Committee that she would not cut her conscience to suit that year's fashions.

Lobdell saw frontline combat during World War II, witnessed American victory there turn into the cruel, facile pseudopatriotism of McCarthyism back home, and arrived at an intensely sincere anticommercialism as one of the bases for his uncompromisingly undecorative painting.

The author emphasizes how Hawthorne's stories are relevant to American life 150 years later, and how film adaptations of The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables reflected events such as McCarthyism and the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

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